History (and related interesting facts)

There is a movie *supposedly* going to be developed about the Battle of the Chosin Reservoir, called 17 Days of Winter. I say supposedly because there has been no news on it since it was announced a couple years ago, so it is probably sharing development hell with the Mass Effect movie.

A shame, if so. It was the greatest battle against the odds in American military history, yet even in the U.S. very few have heard of it. It had the misfortune of being in a 'forgotten war' rather than the Second World War or the Civil War, both of which attract a great deal more interest from people browsing the military history sections of American book stores.

If and when a movie ever gets filmed, I hope the focus is on Fox company, 2nd Battalion, 7th Marines. While the entire 1st Marine division was surrounded and heavily outnumbered by the PLA's 9th Army Group (roughly 20,000 men surrounded by 120,000), Fox company held arguably the most vital piece of ground in the battlespace (a hill overlooking the strategic Toktong pass, which if cut by the Chinese would have prevented the 1st Marine division from breaking out of the encirclement) and against a staggering 40-to-1 odds.

For four nights and five days the 234 men of F/2/7 held the hill alone in sub-zero temperatures against repeated human wave assaults by roughly 9,000 Chinese soldiers, until another Marine battalion could break through and reinforce them. By the time it was over they had run out of ammo and were using weapons scavenged from the enemy's slain, were fighting behind barricades made from the frozen corpses of the PLA soldiers that had died in the assaults (the ground was too frozen to dig foxholes or trenches), had come close to being overrun more than once and had gone hand-to-hand, and three quarters of the company had been killed or wounded. They did however hold, and the pass was never cut.

It would be easier as well to tell the story of a single company on a single hill than to try and squeeze the entire battle, an event that involved thousands of men spread over many miles of terrain, into a two hour film.